


The Wedding Party Wore Black

by Lemur710



Category: Much Ado About Nothing - Shakespeare
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-03
Updated: 2019-07-03
Packaged: 2020-06-03 13:49:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19465297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lemur710/pseuds/Lemur710
Summary: Beatrice and Benedick share an anniversary with Hero and Claudio. When Hero asked to join their family at the lake house to mark 10 years, Beatrice agreed readily.When Hero arrived with her children but without Claudio, Beatrice hadn’t really wondered why.





	The Wedding Party Wore Black

**Author's Note:**

> This is almost entirely emotional catharsis for the fact that I loathe every man in _Much Ado_ except Benedick (and occasionally Dogberry).
> 
> Setting and descriptions are based upon the Tennant/Tate version of _Much Ado About Nothing_ (which is available on YouTube, and I highly recommend). David Tennant made some acting choices with Benedick in the second act that brought this into being. I’ve tried to maintain that production’s 1980/90s vibe, and gone sort of quasi-Shakespearean with the dialogue. No iambic pentameter, but ideally you can read this and hear Catherine Tate and David Tennant’s performances in your mind. Enjoy!

For their first anniversary, Beatrice surprised her husband with a love poem. She had written it in secret, snickering to herself at each awful turn of phrase she created, only to hand it to Benedick and receive _his poem_ in return. It became tradition after that. Each year, they would write and recite the worst love poems each could devise for the other. It became a family affair when they welcomed Viola, then Duncan, then Miranda, and they took exquisite delight in horrifying and embarrassing their children with their sappy, over-wrought, and poorly rhymed love for one another. 

They were to mark ten years now, and Beatrice had been working steadily on her epic love poem styled after the _Rime of the Ancient Mariner_ , chronicling the grand disaster of Viola’s baby teeth and Benedick’s attempt at being a stealthy Tooth Fairy. (Viola woke up every time he tried to leave a quarter on her pillow, leading him to once drop to the floor and try to pass for a stuffed bear in the purple glow of her nightlight. He returned to their bedroom and reenacted each failed mission until Beatrice was gasping for air and howling with laughter.)

Hero and Claudio shared their anniversary, but the couples rarely celebrated together, with the exception of their first. After that, life and distance and the acquisition of new bedfellows separated Beatrice from her cousin more than she would have liked. When Hero asked to join their family at the lake house to mark 10 years, Beatrice agreed readily. When Hero arrived with her children but without Claudio, Beatrice hadn’t really wondered why.

Benedick steered the boat rough across the lake’s chopping waves, bouncing them wildly. Viola and Duncan shrieked in delight as the innertube behind the boat caught air for a few seconds.

“Not too fast, dear,” Beatrice said, glancing at Benedick. His shirtless shoulders had been tinged red by the sun. “We do want to go home with all the children.”

“Aah,” Benedick dismissed with a smile. His mirrored sunglasses reflected her own disgustingly fond expression back at her. “Listen to them. They love it.”

Beatrice laughed. She looked to Hero, expecting to see a laugh on her face, too, or at least a smile. Benedick had always made her laugh. But Hero’s thoughts seemed far away. Her youngest, little Leonard, only three, slept soundly in her arms despite the engine’s growl, his sun-pink cheeks shaded by Benedick’s borrowed yellow sunhat. Hero’s oldest, Rosaline, sat curled up in a towel with Beatrice’s youngest, Miranda, watching the “big kids” grin in the spray behind the boat. 

They spent their days on the lake, either splashing in the cool—often downright cold—waves lapping the beach or roaring across the water in the rented speedboat. Benedick took delight in obnoxiously bright swim trunks while Beatrice felt more herself, and Hero looked more herself than she had in a long while, wearing the breezy island clothes they’d donned in Messina. They gathered at a picnic table for their lunches, bundling the kids into rainbow-colored beach towels, and Beatrice nauseated herself for enjoying the way the sun caught the gray in Benedick’s brown hair.

No gray yet touched Hero’s curls. She was beautiful as ever, though sadder about the eyes. Sadness never had looked right on her face, not to Beatrice. She watched her cousin through her sunglasses and the curtain of her own red hair whipping about her head.

“Oi! Down!” Hero called, catching the splash of Viola’s little body bouncing right off the innertube.

“Coming ‘round!” Benedick hollered back, slowing and making a wide circle through the water.

A smile finally graced Hero’s mouth as she stood to lean over the boat and help the kids back on board. Viola and Duncan’s giggles claimed the air as Benedick cut the engine. The water slapped the boat, sending them swaying and waving in the sudden quiet. 

“One more go?” Viola pleaded, even as her teeth chattered.

“No.” Beatrice shook her head resolutely. “When your lips are bluer than the water, it’s time to return to land, my little sea lion.” It was a testament to how cold Viola was that she didn’t argue further and simply followed her little brother to Auntie Hero’s helping arms. 

For the children, Hero’s spirits stayed bright enough. Five children between the ages of eight and three didn’t afford much silence and Hero existed within the loving chaos like a celestial spirit. Viola was always leading the others around on some adventure of her design. (“Bossy like her mother,” Beatrice muttered to Benedick one night. “Leadership skills,” he countered. “She sounds like General Williams leading us into battle.”) Auntie Hero fawned just the right amount over Duncan’s mess of a drawing and helped Rosaline cut her hotdog into bite-size pieces. She teased Benedick over his home-made macaroni salad (which thankfully only looked terrible) until Miranda nearly threw up from laughter. She never lost that incredible maternal patience Beatrice had yet to develop, even when Leonard fussed and kicked and screamed and refused to go to bed. Beatrice could still hear Hero’s sweet and steady voice drifting down the stairs as she collapsed onto the lounge chair on the porch.

She stared at the dark shadow of the treeline and the bright stars, hazy through the screens protecting her from the mosquitos and all the chirping things outside. Benedick emerged a few minutes later, having successfully told the children two—“no, one more, Daddy”—three bedtime stories and tucked them into their covers.

He relaxed back on the chair opposite hers with a sigh. “Thanks,” he said, taking a swig of the beer Beatrice had waiting for him.

“Would you marry me again?” she asked in the silence that wasn’t quite silence with the bullfrogs outside and the keening infant upstairs.

“Are you asking theoretical or practical?” Benedick replied.

“Pray, what’s the difference?”

“Well.” He shifted in his seat a bit, always so ready to talk, and Beatrice couldn’t stop her smile. “If you mean theoretical, if given all the events of my life presented to me again, in order, would I make the same choices and marry you all over again, then the answer is yes,” he said. “But if you’re speaking in the practical, as in, would I consent to another ceremony and again claim you before God and country in holy matrimony, then the answer is also yes. Why do you ask?”

“I want a new anniversary.”

Benedick turned to her. Night gave his face a mask, but she could read it well enough. Just as she knew he could read hers. He didn’t ask her why.

They’d danced and sang and celebrated, having untangled all misunderstandings, but something had been broken the day Claudio rejected Hero at the altar. It passed in the calendar, the date that Hero had intended to be her wedding day, with no recognition save the way to stood out to Hero, to Beatrice, even to Benedick. 

As forgiveness flowed with the wine, Benedick withdrew his resignation letter, but he left Don Pedro’s company barely ten months later. He still visited with his old friend once or twice a year when the prince’s business brought him near, but they were not close as they once had been. As for Claudio, it had been years since Benedick would have called him ‘friend’ without a downward turn of his mouth. Claudio was _family_ now and the connection was not an easy one.

Beatrice supposed they’d not made it a very welcoming thing for Claudio, her and Benedick. Oh, they gathered at holidays and weddings and at the birth of babies. They laughed and drank. Benedick and Claudio had a lifetime of stories from their time in service together, but the jokes were always a bit thin and Benedick always stood with his back a little straighter. The directive was never far from mind, “Love my cousin.”

Claudio had vowed to, had sworn to, but Beatrice wondered if he ever had. She would scarcely say she understood love but for feeling it so deeply, for Hero, for Benedick, for their children, for Hero’s children. That she would die for any one of them was a certainty she felt in her bones, and more importantly, she would _live_ for them. Each day, she would awaken and love them with as much of her good parts as she could manage.

The Wedding Day That Wasn’t had instead become a funeral; something had died during those precious seconds and it took Beatrice many years in her own marriage to understand what it was. 

“Marrying you,” she said to Benedick in the darkness, “is the only part of those days that I do not recall with pain.”

“Aye.” He gently clasped her hand. His skin was cool and damp from the bottle. “If only you could lend your cousin your lungs that she might voice her pain as you do.”

“Would be better I could borrow hers. We might still be welcome in Messina and plagued by fewer mosquitos.” She tried to laugh, but it broke in her throat.

“What did you say that did not need saying?”

Tears pricked at Beatrice’s eyes. Certain images, smells, touches—they returned like nightmares. The scent of the flowers that had decorated the church, the fragrance of the perfume that had lingered in Hero’s white veil. Leonato’s foot striking out, meeting only the white puffs of Hero’s dress, but meaning to bruise, to wound his daughter. How he’d charged at Hero, screaming, as if to tear her apart, and only Benedick standing there, arm outstretched, had stopped him. For a bloodless horror, it forever chilled Beatrice’s heart. 

“I had an uncle that loved me once,” she whispered. Benedick’s hold on her hand tightened.

Early in their marriage, just after Viola’s birth, they’d returned to Messina, to the beautiful estate of Don Leonato and the scene of so many joyful moments in Beatrice’s life. They celebrated late into the night with drink and song like times of old. Thick with wine and missing Hero, Beatrice found her tongue loosened and turned into a lash. She imagined striking her uncle, flaying him with words as he’d done her cousin. She hardly remembered all she’d said, but she remembered Benedick behind her, silent, a hand at her back, not to pull her away, but to steady her, to remind her that he was there. He interfered only once. Beer heavy, one of Leonato’s friends bellowed back at her, slinging names Benedick himself had called her a dozen times before with no such venom. “Sit down, sir,” Benedick had said, his usually playful voice firm as iron, “the lady deserves to be heard.” 

Whether or not her uncle had taken any of her words to heart, Beatrice did not know. She knew they’d not returned to Messina and that no further invitations had been extended, though her family knew well where she was. Leonato used to tell her, “I love you as I love my own daughter,” and truly he had. His love for Beatrice had been as thin, as conditional a thing as his love for Hero had proven to be. 

“It was, I realize, quite an unfair thing I asked of you that day,” she said to Benedick. Lightning bugs glittered just outside the screen, illuminating then disappearing like apparitions. Distantly, she realized she no longer heard little Leonard’s wailing from the bedroom overhead. 

“What thing?”

“To kill Claudio.”

Benedick let out a long sigh. So much and yet so little had changed with Claudio since then. “You were testing me.” He continued before she could protest, either to agree or deny, “Perhaps ‘teaching me’ would be the righter way to say it.”

“Dare I ask what I taught you?”

“To listen to you. To trust you. You could hardly be expected to marry me if I couldn’t do that.”

Beatrice gazed at the faint line of his profile and wondered when exactly his had become the dearest face in the world to her. 

“Honestly, and I feel no pride in this,” he said, “I needed your words to help me understand the wrongness of the act. I’d been around men so long...well, that’s how they think of women, isn’t it? She must be chaste, though he visits all the brothels between Padua and Rome. Public scorn made for a foul wedding, but to draw blood on that account? I saw it not. But you took my hand as though we walked to the altar, and I thought then, what if I heard some similar scandal of you? What if I believed I saw, with mine own eyes, a ‘betrayal of your virtue’? What would I then have done? ... I would have talked to you. Just you. I would not have screamed at you, nor shamed you, and, though you call me a fool, I would still have wanted to marry you.”

“You fool,” Beatrice said, so very fondly.

She remembered well those heady hours of revelation, of daring to believe the truly—well and truly—unbelievable. That there was attraction was undeniable, that there was equal intelligence and wit was already a source of great frustration to others, but in the giddy skitter of her daydreams, it was folly. They would argue one another into early graves, she was sure of it. There was no substance, no meat to the meal. Then she’d observed that hardness in his eyes, the way his voice could steady when he spoke of serious matters. It was in those moments that Beatrice’s attraction to the silly bauble that was Signior Benedick transformed and she saw a husband, a partner. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps she had been testing him. 

“Who’s more the fool? The fool or the fool who marries him?” He pulled her hand to his mouth for a quick kiss to her knuckles. 

“I bid you challenge Claudio, but I said nothing of leaving the prince’s company. You’ve never told me, why did you write that letter?”

“Because I thought I had been serving an honorable man,” Benedick answered, “and my definition of ‘honor’ had so altered I could no longer serve with a full heart. I saw what came of loving with words but not in deeds.”

“You _in deed_ did me great honor in the doing,” Hero said, her silhouette leaning in the doorway. Beatrice wondered how long she’d been listening.

“Aye, and would do it again.” Benedick released Beatrice’s hand and gestured to a nearby chair. “Come, join us, cousin.”

“You have succeeded in luring the beast to sleep? Did you have to engage the harp?” Beatrice asked.

“No harp, but the beast is tamed for now,” said Hero. “Therefore, I will retire too.”

“Oh, not even one drink?” Beatrice reached for her cousin, squeezing her small hand.

“Nay, but I do have news ere I go.” Hero stepped out onto the porch and perched in the space at the foot of Beatrice’s chair. Once there, with Beatrice and Benedick’s attention upon her, she fell silent, the air tinged with worry. She fidgeted. “Before I joined you here, I…shared words with Claudio.”

“What words were those?” Beatrice asked.

“Not of a pleasant nature, in truth. I informed him of my intent to leave, and the children with me.”

Alarm tightened in Beatrice’s chest, though this was, perhaps, the very news she’d longed to hear for many years. Her voice failed her. Luckily, Benedick’s did not.

“What response did Claudio give?”

Hero laughed but it was nothing of mirth, and her curled head lowered. “I fear you both think me a fool for marrying him after he rebuked me so cruelly—”

“Nay—” both Beatrice and Benedick sought to interrupt, but Hero would go on.

“I had thought his lesson learned that day. I had thought, wrongly as he has since shown, that that was a final challenge for my soldier before he could become the man and husband I needed. I had thought...I had thought he had learnt to trust me.” She wiped her eyes.

Beatrice sat up, folding her leg beneath her to put an arm around Hero, to kiss her cheek in comfort. She and Benedick knew well how little had changed since the funeral that became a wedding, but with the crickets keeping time, Hero told them much they did not know. Claudio’s immaturity and judgmental nature did not mellow with time. Rather, it deepened with familiarity and the illusion of ownership strengthened by a ring. A bright soldier on the battlefield he had certainly been, but less reliable when life’s mundane tasks needed doing. The joy had been in the wooing, not the having.

Hero asserted that there was no violence save for a love that was utterly conditional. A violence to the heart and to the soul that made her feel as though she walked on a tightrope, fearful that every step may be the one that breaks the tenuous threads of his regard.

_Trust_ had died on the Wedding Day that Wasn’t, Beatrice knew. The wedding party had rightly worn black.

While Claudio had felt righteous in his fury, believing his faith in Hero to have been betrayed, he made himself a villain. When he should have been learning to trust Hero, he instead became a cruel teacher, showing Hero that she could not trust _him_. Not with her feelings nor her doubts, certainly not with her faults nor the ugly humanity that lives in every creature of conscious thought. When he could have had a woman—a living, vibrant partner in her greatest fullness—he chose to treat her as livestock he’d contracted to purchase and found unsatisfactory. He did not talk to her. He would not listen, and thus he betrayed every beautiful thing they could have been. Trust shattered in the heart is not easily mended, nor its painful shards easily removed.

The telling took longer than perhaps Hero had intended and Benedick brought her a cider to soothe the tale. She did not know, she said, if it would be a separation forever, but ten years of walking a tightrope had left her tired, exhausted from carrying so much with no place to rest. 

“You’ll rest here,” Benedick said, “in the metaphorical and the practical.”

“We can share, you and I.” Beatrice squeezed her in a hug. “Be bedfellows like we used to.” She knew Benedick would not object to the adjustment in sleeping arrangements. There were plenty of rooms, and Benedick loved her. He trusted her. She trusted him, and on that steady ground, minor inconveniences simply did not rank.

Weary from talk and sorrow, Hero fell asleep quickly in the plush bed of the master bedroom. Beatrice watched her a moment; she had always loved that golden-haired girl, more sister than cousin after all this time. 

“Hey,” she whispered to Benedick in the corridor between rooms. He paused in his pajamas, his hair damp from washing himself of lake and sweat. She tapped the bridge of his nose that was red and beginning to peel. “Sunscreen tomorrow, eh? Or you reclaim from little Leonard your sunhat.”

“I will do one or both, my freckled love.” 

“Oi.” She swatted at him with no heat and went into his arms when he reached for her. She kissed him gently. “The wedding party wore black. Should that have been a warning?”

“Our wedding party wore black as well,” he answered against her lips. “Same wedding party.” His hands spread down her back to rest low at her waist. 

She thought to make a joke, the kind they volleyed back and forth at each other. Say, _‘twas the grieving of Common Sense as two fools came together_ , but the rare treasure of the man in her arms, the incredible bounty of the love between them, the sheer improbability of a marriage that was _truly happy_ stopped her tongue.

“I do love nothing in the world so well as you,” she said.

He smiled. “Nor I.” The kiss he gave her was familiar, nothing unexpected, and utterly perfect. They parted to retire to their respective bedrooms, but Beatrice grabbed his arm before he got far.

“Of all the couples we know, who would’ve thought _we_ would be the happy ones?” A laugh bubbled from her throat and she clamped a hand over her mouth.

“I know!” he cried, and they gripped each other, weak in the knees as they cackled—as silently as they could—with surprise and joy.

The next day, Hero joined the family tradition and Beatrice shared _The Rime of the Blatant Toothfairy_ to vigorous applause and laughter. There was so much laughter in her house. That was what Beatrice loved most and supposed she should have expected from a life shared with Benedick. Oh, they made each other laugh so much.

It made the hard times easier to bare.


End file.
